Tag: day

I’m a yoga instructor, but I’m also a CrossFitter, a runner, and a skier, and keeping yoga as an integral part of my life allows me to strengthen and stretch my body to help me stay healthy and reach my fitness goals. I also work full-time and am a mom, and keeping a daily yoga practice is absolutely essential to my mental health and clarity. That being said, I don’t have time to do a full 90-minute practice every day, but I do like to take 10 to 15 minutes a day to hop on my mat and do these 12 poses.

How do we begin to hope when hope has wrought crushing disappointment in our lives? Zack and I knew we wanted children. A piece of paper we got at the hospital reassured me that the miscarriage was not my fault, no matter how much sex I had or how much exercise I did. When we got home from that appointment, my husband and I laid on our bed underneath the comforter he had used in college and wailed, and I thought how unfair it was that that bedspread had outlived our child, and some but not all of my hope died, like depleting power in a video game. Her grandmother had had seven miscarriages before giving birth to her father, something she said perhaps to empathize/perhaps to be kind/perhaps because it was a reflex and she had and said the same to any woman who walked through her door after a miscarriage. Nothing brought me joy, because it is hard to have joy without hope, and I was killing my hope on a daily basis. Life ends only in death, and why hadn’t I thought of that sooner, before we tried-really tried-to have a child? For extra credit in one of my college political science classes, we could memorize what Thomas Hobbes said about life outside of human society-“Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” My parents traveled for work; my husband traveled for work; my mind went to work obsessively charting how their deaths would play out, how I would be left all alone, how this baby would die inside me and then I would die. They don’t tell you how pregnancy allies your body against sanity, how it makes your heart beat faster-this is true; you are creating a new organ along with a baby and so, in order to increase your blood levels by half, your body makes more blood, which makes your heart pound-and how it makes your breathing shallower; how it makes you feel like a panic attack is always imminent. “I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing,” T. S. Eliot wrote in “East Coker.” Eliot never gave birth.

“It should be a reward,” says Sara Maitland, author of How To Be Alone. Loneliness is simply being alone and not liking it, says Maitland. Being alone in your flat with nothing to do is more isolating than being in the Antarctic with nobody around for miles. The key to being alone is having things to do: a sense of a quest and a purpose. Being alone in your flat with nothing to do is probably more isolating than being in the Antarctic with nobody around for miles. I recharge when I’m alone, and I feel most alive when I’m with my own thoughts – and nature. I look forward to my phone calls and being home, but I’ve just got totally used to being alone. Coming home after being away made us appreciate being together even more.

We found that increasing your engagement and productivity at work could be as simple as making a plan for the day. We investigated two types of daily planning and how they influence employee engagement in dynamic work environments. Despite its popularity and acclaimed benefits, little research has actually investigated this type of planning in real work contexts. The second type of planning is referred to as “Contingent planning,” in which people consider the possible disruptions or interruptions they may face in their work day and devise a plan to address them if they occur. Contingent planning is less commonly used than time-management planning because individuals frequently make plans that overestimate how much they will get done and underestimate to account for how their work will be disrupted. In theory, both types of planning should enhance employee engagement because they involve setting more specific goals for the day, which should help employees focus their time and attention, as well increase their sense of progress as they more clearly see the accomplishment of their tasks. As for daily contingent planning, this type of planning also helped employees enhance their engagement and productivity. Our research uncovered that a large percentage of employees’ daily planning differs across work days, which means most people do not consistently employ planning each day.

Here’s one more, from the journal Frontiers in Plant Science: Birch trees “Sleep” at night. It’s harder to do with big trees in the forest. Why are the trees drooping? One reason could be that they’re dropping their internal water pressure, as New Scientist suggests, in response to the cessation of photosynthesis at night. Another reason could be that the trees are actually resting: It takes energy to raise limbs up toward the light during the day. Puttonen hopes this research will lead to a better understanding of how trees use water at different times of the days. Since the study published in 2016, a followup report in 2017 found that different species of trees have different “Sleep” patterns. So more research will be needed to full understand the complex patterns of tree sleep. The tree at day is less droopy than the tree at night.

Your mother died? Your wife left? Your husband lost his job? If you know what your primary purpose is in life, these stressful events are much easier to deal with. Today, to celebrate this site’s twelfth birthday, I want to present twelve alternative exercises for discovering your purpose and passion. At the end of this article, I’ll give you a list of recommended reading – and tell you what I think is the single best book for discovering passion and purpose. A couple of these exercises are my own – the hundred-word exercise, for instance – but most are not. There are plenty of excellent books out there that can help you figure out what you want out of life even if they don’t ask readers to fill out forms our meditate on what’s important. It’s a ground-breaking short book about how to find purpose even under the worst circumstances. Duckworth makes a convincing argument that passion and perseverance – or, in Money Boss lingo, purpose and patience – are the best predictors of success. If you can hone in on a single top-level purpose then doggedly pursue it, your life will be filled with meaning and happiness.

As you know by now, the spinal tap led to a rare and debilitating condition called a cerebrospinal fluid leak. As if a simple CSF leak wasn’t sufficient, I had connected issues that arose from the leak. We all knew was that Duke seemed to be the best in the business for patching spinal leaks. The third did, and threw me into agonizing “Rebound high pressure,” where the leak was sealed but I had excess CSF fluid since my body was so accustomed to leaking. From not knowing if the patching worked, to navigating high pressure, then adjusting medication to try and stabilize pressure, followed by the crushing knowledge that I was back to leaking after I sat too heavily – it was all too much. The walks came with a lot of pain, but without the “Brain sag” feeling that I felt for five months when leaking. Many of the CSF leakers who had a hard time getting sealed, or re-leaked months or years later doing something seemingly innocuous. Despite the stats that say many people leak and re-leak again when their first leaks are difficult to fix.

Inspired by a colleague, the time management expert Laura Vanderkam, I decided to spend the month of February tracking exactly how I spent my time, down to half-hour increments. In my time-tracking exercise, I counted my time under multiple categories if it legitimately filled both criteria. I might spend more time socializing than some – I live in a city, and I don’t have kids – but the same principle of building overlapping personal and professional circles holds no matter how many hours per week you have to devote. Certain hours of the day are especially likely to be “Wasted.” I don’t waste much time on social media. During the times when I did fall into the social media rabbit hole, a clear pattern emerged: It almost always occurred between 10 PM and 11 PM. Despite recent questions about the accuracy of Roy Baumeister’s seminal theory of ego depletion, it certainly seemed to be the case for me that I was most susceptible to distraction at that time, when I was worn down from the demands of the day but not tired enough to sleep. It’s also not overwhelming, and well under the amount of time I allocated each day to pure client work, networking and time with friends, and even reading. Without data, it’s easy to paint an erroneous picture of how we spend our time, whether it’s inadvertently exaggerating the number of hours we work or assuming we’re wasting more time than we really do. My month of time tracking revealed useful insights that have enabled me to become more productive – and if you make an effort to evaluate your schedule, it may highlight ways you can optimize moving forward as well.

Stoicism emerged as a philosophy, a way of life – similar to a religion, really – most famously in ancient Rome somewhere around 50-100 AD. Two millennia later, the philosophy is enjoying a revival of sorts, and it’s not hard to understand why. The primary goal of ancient Stoicism was to figure out the best way to live; as modern philosopher Lawrence Becker writes: “Its central, organizing concern is about what one ought to do or be to live well – to flourish.” And this question of how to live is perhaps humanity’s most enduring – becoming especially acute in ages in which a sense of shared meaning has atrophied and every individual is left to find meaning on his own. While we’ve covered some tenets of Stoicism on the Art of Manliness before, we’ve never laid out its more concrete practices – the tactics that lead both to personal joy and the betterment of society. It’s my aim to present five ways you can start to inject Stoicism into your life today, and begin experiencing more happiness and fulfillment. “Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day…. The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.” -Seneca. To be Epicurean – one who basically just seeks the things in life that feel the best – you have to ever be experiencing pleasure. All of us have an ideal version of ourselves in our head. That version eats better, exercises more, is a little more patient with his wife and kids, doesn’t waste time at work, etc. Would my best self write more letters to old friends as a way to stay in touch?

The first 90 minutes of your day are crucial to everything that happens thereafter. If you don’t produce something special during those first 90 minutes, chances are, your whole day will falter. Make A “Cognitive Commitment” That You Will Produce A ResultYou need to make a commitment to yourself that you will produce a result. If you produce a result during the first 90 minutes of your day, every single day, your life will look VERY VERY different from the lives of most people. You’ll have created a resultâ€Š- which produces confidence and clarity. Abandoning the old ineffective thoughts;formulating the new and effective thoughtsexperiencing the intense thrilling feeling of “Aha”During your first 90 minutes, your job is to get an epiphany and to then do something about that epiphany. ConclusionHow you spend the first 90 minutes of your day will determine your success in life. It is your job during the first 90 minutes of your day to produce a result.